scott-martin

I think that whoever developed the Arachne-Ernalda-Glorantha complex probably already did a lot of that. Some aspects of what we now call XU are still embedded in the official story of the transcendental Earth Queen . . . . . . except as far as I know, there is no one official story. The grandmothers have been fighting. In the aftermath of a savage religious civil conflict, theology and deep myth are in flux. Someone will put a coherent narrative of the goddess together from the available components (tradition and revelation) and someone will skulk away to nurse the scraps. I could drone on about "multiple historical Ernaldas" exactly like how we talk about a syncretic Orlanth or a syncretic Yelm, but that's not nearly as fun as discovering the controversies in play. All I know here is that the really big houses in Nochet have shrines to someone we could call Black Ernalda. Maybe this is an artifact of poor art preservation as the pigments finally break down over Time, but the girls running the houses have come up with a more useful interpretation, "nigra sum sed formosa," they shrug. The goddess is a green goddess but she is a black goddess also. And I think about what the big old boys in the local Issaries cult say when they get "tired and emotional" about our god being a black god and it makes sense. In some places, they remember their Ernalda dying. In others, she just vanished and came back later, said she was sleeping. Sometimes she was in love with Flamal, sometimes married to the sun. A weaver weaves some strands together into knots while leaving space for others to run.

Yeah, this is a functional distinction IMG. What does the entity do? What magic does it transact? And from the other side, what do satyrs do within the beast magical ecology? Some have bodies, some don't. Some are attached to bodies, some aren't. Sometimes you need a body and sometimes you don't. Some bodies work different. These are deep considerations for the animist. This is why I tend to focus on the human side of the interaction with "nature spirits" and their gender. Show me the magician (intentional or otherwise) and we can talk about when the entities they interact with are "male."

Elmal was the southern Orlanthi Sun God, the brother, once first among many. For the western storm the aloof sun was Grandfather Mortal and the kids hated him. He called himself the emperor of light or the boss who will never retire and get out of the way. Until one kid got him out of the way and his consciousness changed like Oedipus in the fantasy trilogy. He changed and became patron of shamanic ancestor worship. "One day, the brothers who had been driven out, came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end to the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually." The power of Death was either the first of the New Powers or the last of the old. It came first to the hands of Humakt (who used it on Grandfather Mortal) and then to Orlanth (who used it on Yelm). The death of the Emperor of Light felled the last strongholds of the age, and instituted a new reign. At a certain historical moment these strands were knit and knotted. Maybe the brother was the one who died and changed. Maybe the father proved harder to kill than hoped and he lives in the back of their heads now. Maybe the sign of all of this is what we call the Y rune, the fork.

I finally got back to ̶M̶a̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶ Maniria this morning and was confronted with something big and pink and not like me, the new Journal of Psychick Albion. Not sure yet it's relevant to the interesting twist this thread has taken but we will go there. And then PiL demanded to enter the Eurovision contest. But in terms of the thread topic, I think this is the kind of "director's opera" that the Great Hero Wars Campaign needs to be able to support. How wonderful an achievement it would be if this had the recombinant persistence of Shakespeare, endless interpretations and creative stagings locked in tension with the mostly fixed text with its mostly inexorable wyrd. How can we be sure these aren't Jethro Tull lyrics?

Fortuitously this has been rehabilitated in a fresh reading of how shanassee trees actually work but as usual our own forest comes first. Bread and tits,

IMG the key to the answer revolves around how the way magicians who work with these spirits are also working with gender and desire . . . intentionally or via unconscious heroquest channels. Most of the accounts we have are of relatively straight boys looking to access fertility and its higher runic octaves by cultivating relationships with "female" spirits. As noted already in thread, when "nature" impinges in the life of the female magician in this way the entity is often classified as beast folk. For those looking for different kinds of magic, the gender of the spirit is largely contingent. You get who you get and on a very basic level they tend to keep their pants on. Most basic elemental contacts are of this type since they usually struggle to model any consistent personality traits whatsoever. But as you move deeper into their hierarchies you can access more complex (named) daimones who can express gender and so forth . . . or not, as it suits them. The historical evolution of "female" cohorts within the Gloranthan magical traditions we know about may be an accident or (less attractive) something intrinsic to the world. As noted in thread, there are plenty of river gods but Water is obviously fluid and contextual as far as modern storm people are concerned. Most storm magicians (rune "lords") we know about will interact with local nature entities as symbolic marriage partners (and so the water becomes "female") or rivals (river "gods") . . . a tradition of rune "ladies" within the FHQ cult or wherever might or might not cultivate the same kinds of relationships. In theory there may be traditions where a female magician heroforms one type of spirit and a male magician embodies another in their various rites so the subjectivity is reciprocal. On the other hand we moderns would read some architectures of desire as homosexual. A few of the known Pelorian ceremonial systems seem to mostly call dude spirits, for example, but it's up to you at this stage whether these shining beings of light are considered "natural" in your game, who calls them and for what purpose. The fetch is a complicated phenomenon. Sometimes it looks like you and sometimes it doesn't. TLDR find out what the female centaurs are doing in your game and you should be pretty close.

I would let them do it because from the Hyalor point of view this is the seed of a revitalized covenant between riders and the rode that gives the most literally wretched members of the larger community a bigger reason to live beyond the stew pot. Extending training to these animals liberates them from what would otherwise be a failed existence and in the process elevates the entire horse world just a little toward grace. This might start out as a business but it can easily become a religious crusade. Finding out whether the Issaries can fully participate in this vision produces great gaming moments. As you point out the real scale chokepoint is training additional trainers willing and able to rehabilitate rejected horse flesh. You need to initiate a new kind of Hyalor horseman, a sort of society of the horseman's word as it were. Real whisperers. The establishment might not welcome the sudden competition, which again naturally produces the kind of complications that make entrepreneurial schemes interesting in play. And in the meantime maybe one of two of those rejected animals will reveal a talent for flight.

Oh that is good. "We stink like melting lawn chairs, the solvents of our origin, but our vegetable fraction is ubiquitous. We burn like barbies, a mass produced cartoon in the low-bandwidth mirror of your mind. And oh oh oh how we dance." Maybe in the new year we'll find the deep mysteries behind this sadly truncated trip report. After all we know endless obvious ways to incorporate Plant as an ally in one's practice, why should magic-drenched Glorantha be somehow poorer.

When Glorantha gives you an obvious undeveloped placeholder sometimes it's useful to integrate it with another RL inspiration and triangulate. For example IMG the historical Magra retains a kind of Vampira protogoth vibe despite now being formerly classified as one of the minor peoples who indulged their ambition in the Bright Empire and were punished for it later. "Your wings or your song, Magra. Choose." - Pseudarkatika Some placeholders never get integrated in this way and it's a little sad when it happens.

I am often wrong but this is my favorite comment on this site this year. In terms of the original post, the historical Argrath is pretty much hardwired into RQG at this stage and will only become more integral as the publishing continues. If your Argrath washes out then either a washout is going to be king ("last temptation" style, a viable approach with shadowy managers running the real show) or history will produce someone who casts an Argrath-shaped shadow to snap into that particular hole in the narrative. The alternative is rewinding to before Argrath became preordained, which means starting the game in 1616-24 and letting it unspool from there. This might mean a reversion to multiple argrath theory or a wild and crazy future nobody in the official prophetic timeline knows about.

Now that this thread has achieved its parthenogenetic glory and we're looking at the rune affiliations I think we'll start finding alternative forms of initiation everywhere like lythrum salicaria taking over a New England meadow. Looking again at the cult description I think the procedure described was not originally an adoption ritual but what certain communities used to create a new shanassee tree upon the expiration of the existing seed provider or simply his appointed term. For most born humans, this is as close to vegetable consciousness as it ever needs to get, and it happens after a period of dynamic activity that we associate with HKE. The forest isn't human but it isn't stupid either. Much like adoptive trolls unwilling to throw out the eyes, the forest isn't going to interfere with our talent for spreading seed on our own and there are other capabilities we have that are better exploited and not replaced. And it means that for most male humans the most natural integration into the great plant mystery is not as an adoptive son but as a groom and ultimately as a father of tribes. The elves you seek in the world are your children. And for would-be mothers, the most natural thing is to identify with the goddess herself and bear the kind of children she would bear. She already provides those spells. To emphasize: these are the spells she provides.

As you say, sometimes you want a lot of scary looking bramble to keep the birds and neighborhood children on the right side of your berries. The aim of the berry, like the adoption rite, is to make more elves. But smart gardeners aren't shy about exploiting hunger, horror and the rumor table to regulate access . . . when the remedy has a reputation for being extreme, you know you'll only attract extreme need. All others will find solutions elsewhere, and these solutions tend to be what interest me about historical elf religious interactions. Who knows what "really" happens behind the hype? None of my business really, although the prevalence of "maker" modalities (a lot of carving and cutting and shaping) strikes me as bearing additional deep investigation. But this investigation might not go down quite the easy deer trail people hope to hike. I come back to Dionysus as symbolic lord of the "dance" (the death + resurrection show) because the word used in the Homeric Hymns for his transformations is γίνομαι . . . becoming, transitioning, something more like reification. The literal machine translation is exciting, something like a frozen pivot between presence and non-presence, the moment of the change. When he does the pirates, at that moment the dolphins both are and are not. Which is of course the classical Arabic introduction to the magic narrative, kān yā mā kān, it was and it wasn't. The moment of the tree and the mammal, the plant and the man. The moment of the elf. Whether that means some elaborate wooden person or a different dream of when we all lived in soft buckskin and hunted with beautiful bows across a forest that stretched and echoed with laughter across the continent (does anyone remember laughter) is a question only the heart can answer. All I know is that when we chase the lord of the dance too hard we tend to miss the seasonal pantomime and end up with nothing but ecstatic murder on the mountain. Whether these are the same thing dolled up with paint and stage machinery is the same question. The brambles, as it were, are fixed. Only the shadows are dancing.

I'm reminded of this epic rant issued by a magus closer to home. My Glorantha is old enough to have already suffered through multiple cycles of routinization and disenchantment. We can still participate in a "golden age" when the skies are made of paper and the seas of lemonade but in the war-torn 1620s the road back to that site of consciousness is no longer persistent or trivial, and most people who run out of rune points end up coming back to the regular lozenge to stack the clacks and sew the pants. The spike is bright dirt now. What does this say about elves in someone's Glorantha? Maybe their magic needs to be more uh florid than it is in mine. That's all right. Chase the level of wonder that you need. Elf hats for all elf heads.

It's a good question, o my friend of the former runner of the plastic wheel. Quite a big difference between the two because as you point out, while it is Pamalt's responsibility to fix the world, it is never explicitly his fault. Any guilt or blame he has in the murder of the southern sun and other crimes is a secret so deep that it's almost impossible to communicate in most of their languages. They literally developed a whole religious mechanism to avoid saying it. But Pamalt also steps up immediately whereas Orlanth needs to absorb the repercussions of his actions before he decides to change his life. Pamalt takes responsibility for this because that's what Pamalt does. Whatever the motivating force, this makes him and Orlanth different from most of the gods we hear about. There were once a lot of these survival covenant gods, each with a different and maybe unique orientation to the crime of the world. Now there are fewer.

Glorantha was originally much smaller and will one day be larger, expanding as every successful LBQ-style revolution in consciousness opens up new horizons. Fronela, for example, truly did not exist as part of the shared lozenge until Harmast went over the edge of the middle world pursuing desperate solutions and came back with an entire corner piece in tow to knit into the map. He looked west and opened up the west, so we call it "west" faring. This expansion of geographical possibility overcoming stuck systems is the real bonus. We see it again and again: Heort reaches across the sky to unite Kerofinela with Saird, Ralios is incorporated with the rebirth of Flamal, Seshnela fills in the southwest, the 7M Conspiracy introduces Peloria to its neighbors, Snodal finding the way to the far north. Each iteration opens up new ideas, new combinations, new complexity as once-abstract peripheral territories become integrated into the core experience. The process is not quite done as the east and south approach their union with the emerging supercontinent. The integration of Sheng, for example, reflects real communion with the east instead of through placeholders and proxies. Eventually whole dimensions unknown to us now will open up, the edges of the world fold back on themselves and the horrible ruptures of zzabur are repaired: the circumference is nowhere, the center is everywhere. Arguably this is only a different kind of metaphor, with development of the game setting recapitulating the trajectory of mature consciousness itself. Or bring in a dragon with its eggs. Let them hatch, let the system wake up from its dream. In this model, however, the maps are only the shells to be left behind when the occupant has gotten what it needs.

Some tribes decide Goofus is actually the better role model and evolve along Goofus lines until something gets in their way. Or some new revelation emerges and they become Gerlant people or whatever. RuneQuest is historically about people (including key creative) who for whatever reason found the Gallant complex especially compelling, maybe imprinting on Prince Valiant and his struggles. It's where we spend our time, how the cosmological constants are jiggered in our part of the world that collectively adds up to everything.

One really useful aspect of mythic precedent is that living people can recognize the patterns emerging (this king is a jerk) and accept the resolution (time for the queen to pick a new dad) without playing out every beat of the story everybody knows. A jerk king losing thanes is headed down the emperor's wyrd. We can all see that. A smart jerk king reads the writing on the wall and surrenders the role before the myth takes over. Of course "smart" and "jerk" rarely ride together but the community can appeal to enlightened self interest and force an abdication. When enough of you vote with your feet and enough satire appears in the agora, the emperor deflates. The guy who wore that crown pivots to some hopefully more productive role. "If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares." I think the tragedy of the Ernalda story, much like that of her sister the moon (let her pale light in to fill up the room), is that she is mythically drawn to bad choices as well as good ones. When the myth takes over, that's the end of consent and all you have left are mythic remedies. Until that moment, her people are free actors like everyone else. Ernalda in herself doesn't have a lot of mythic remedies. To get out of a bad choice she needs to endure until someone gets drawn into the situation or she becomes someone else who can do it herself. But I'm not the expert here.

Definitely. When the tree starts winning, human nature tries as hard as it can to copy the tree. And then when the tree starts losing, you're stuck. If my local sages weren't so tapped out lately figuring out how to reshape our acre of ̶M̶a̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶ Maniria to better express the forest's changing needs (beeches, burdock and lilacs, apparently, and of course oak) my critical translation of the late Geleron Green's 14-volume treatise The Golden Bow or Shadows Dance: Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild would be much, much farther along. As it is, canon will probably move first. We can wait to reveal things that don't really concern the canon like what they actually do with the genitals in particular.

Everything solid melts into "air." Two gods, something like brothers, once had a reasonable claim on the birthright of the Larnste rune, so the ghosts of the Court declared a contest to determine which would be the best steward. When the time came, one brother, under the tutelage of Harana Ilor, came back with Movement, a system of exchange that had reached dynamic equilibrium. The ghosts of the Court decided it was good on the whole but despite all the permutations something was missing, some potential left untried. Maybe, the whisper came, it was a little boring in the end, wind going nowhere. The second brother, who had only the shock of a restless tectonic landscape to claim for a mountain mother, came back with Change, which is Larnste plus Disorder. This was something new at last, the ghosts of the Court determined as they awarded the second brother the prize: not just a power rune but his own element. And so the first brother recedes into his own system in stormy seasons, speaking every language but thunder. On the other hand versions of this story are told where everything solid melts into "light" and the second brother is banished. --[*]-- Elves are just a different type of archaic person in thrall to the great tree consciousness. As much as it pains them to acknowledge, they bleed like us, breed like us and die like us. Wooden bones venerated in museums and libraries are mostly devotional forgeries or, very rarely, a bona fide relic of a profound shamanic experience.

This is a great place to put characters who perform Plant focus but not necessarily undergo the full shamanic ordeal. Like a lot of runes, access to Plant has opened and closed across various communities. Almost seasonal, if you like.

By definition I suppose the Widow is the grandmother whose grandfather died and so she would be the site of the sorrow. But we probably need the hardcore Ernaldans to make these insinuations.

Taka Taka "Fal"

-ga Now that's a particle to conjure with, the abstract Great Goddess who anchors one corner of the earth square being elusive in the sources but theoretically linked to Cybele over here in our world. Hungry girl.

We call it "mother" market for a reason. No variant!

If you or your players are eager to chase a variant figure "Vin Gor" back into the shadows of mythology and then come back, your Glorantha can definitely vary. I used to think the benign/malign earth system was essential and eternal . . . just a technique the Esrolians use to distinguish between bicameral aspects of the feminine mystique, masks of goddess. Summer Queen / Winter Queen. Stepmother / Evil Stepmother. Soft Mother / Wire Mother. Good Girl / Bad Girl. Grandmother / Crone. The gor/kor particle signified that distinction like a detachable organ passed around a coffin floating down the Nile. But now I'm kind of thinking this was a separate pantheon or the vestiges of multiple pantheons assimilated into the modern great goddess cult like the vanir were absorbed into the aesir. In this scenario a lot of gors died before time. Some might come back. Baroshi may be a lost gor. Korang may have been a lost gor. It's the hero wars, ladies.